Sourced

• The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.
  • Marcus Aurelius, in Meditations, IV, 3

• We only have to look around us to see how complexity and psychic temperature are still rising: and rising no longer on the scale of the individual but now on that of the planet. This indication is so familiar to us that we cannot but recognize the objective, experiential, reality of a transformation of the planet as a whole.
  • Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, in The Heart of Matter (1950)

• Change begets change. Nothing propagates so fast.
  • Charles Dickens in Martin Chuzzlewit, Ch. 18 (1844)

• Motion or change, and identity or rest, are the first and second secrets of nature: Motion and Rest. The whole code of her laws may be written on the thumbnail, or the signet of a ring.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson in "Nature", Essays, Second Series (1844)

• Nothing endures but change.
  • Heraclitus, quoted in Lives of the Philosophers by Diogenes Laërtius

• You could not step twice into the same river; for other waters are ever flowing on to you.
  • Heraclitus, Fragment 41, quoted by Plato in Cratylus

• Change is not made without inconvenience, even from worse to better.
  • Richard Hooker, as quoted in the preface of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755)

• Change is not merely necessary to life — it is life.
  • Alvin Toffler, in Future Shock‎ (1970), p. 304

• Se vogliamo che tutto rimanga come è, bisogna che tutto cambi.
  • If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.
  • Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. Il Gattopardo (1958), The Leopard (trans. 1963) Page 29

• Let us go to war. The world has become stale and insipid, the ships ought to be all captured, and the cities battered down, and the world burned up, so that we can start again. There would be fun in that. Some interest, — something to talk about.
  • Editorial in the New York Journal of Commerce (August 1845)

Times change

• The times change, and we change with them.
  • English variant of traditional Latin:

  Tempora mutantur nos et mutamur in illis

  • Quoted (as “proverbial”) in William Harrison’s Description of England, 1577, p. 170, part of Holinshed's Chronicles
  • Variant of

  Omnia mutantur nos et mutamur in illis

  Illa vices quasdam res habet, illa vices.

  All things are changed, and we change with them

  ? Her vices that she has, her vices. ?

  • Attributed by Matthew Borbonius as the motto of Lothair I.

• The times they are a-changin’
  • Bob Dylan, The Times They Are a-Changin’

• Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

  The more things change, the more they are the same.

  • Alphonse Karr, Les Guêpes, January 1849, vi

Unsourced

• We must face the fact that we are on the brink of times when man may be able to magnify his intellectual and inventive capability, just as in the nineteenth century he used machines to magnify his physical capacity. Again, as then, our innocence is lost. And again, of course, the innocence, once lost, cannot be regained. The loss demands attention, not denial.
  • Christopher Alexander

• For me, words are a form of action, capable of influencing change.
  • Ingrid Bengis

• To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.
  • Henri Louis Bergeson

• It is not a matter of exposing one's unchanging identity, the true self that has always been, but a way of exposing one's ceaseless growth, the dynamic self that has yet to be.
  • James Carse

• All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.
  • Anatole France

• You must be the change you wish to see in the world.
  • Mahatma Gandhi

• If we can recognize that change and uncertainty are basic principles, we can greet the future and the transformation we are undergoing with the understanding that we do not know enough to be pessimistic.
  • Hazel Henderson

• In times of profound change, the learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.
  • Eric Hoffer

• It can change as much as it likes. As long as it stays the same
  • Adrian Mourby

• Change is not a matter of not doing something. It is a matter of doing something else — something that is inherently right, free, and pleasurable. Therefore, the key is insight and the freedom to feel and participate in ways of functioning that are right and new.
  • Adi Da Samraj

• In the same way as the tree bears the same fruit year after year, but each time new fruit, all lastingly valuable ideas in thinking must always be reborn.
  • Albert Schweitzer

• Cambia, todo cambia.
  • Changing, everything is changing.
    • Mercedes Sosa

• Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
  • Leo Tolstoy

• History may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme a lot.
  • Mark Twain

• Of the forces which are imperceptible forces, none is greater than that of change ... all things are ever in the state of change ... therefore the I of the past is no longer the I of today.
  • Zhuangzi

• All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward.
  • Ellen Glasgow

• He who rejects change is the architect of decay. The only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery.
  • Harold Wilson

• Growth is the only evidence of life.
  • John Henry Newman, Apologia pro vita sua, 1864

Anonymous

• All things in this world are impermanent. They have the nature to rise and pass away. To be in harmony with this truth brings true happiness.
  • Buddhist chant